We Only Ask Once a Year!
It’s hard to believe this is CounterPunch’s 20th year. It’s even harder to comprehend celebrating this anniversary without our guiding spirit Alexander Cockburn. The last year has been an extreme challenge for all of us CounterPunchers. But we’ve put our noses to the grindstone and tried very hard to live up to Alexander’s lofty standards to produce every day a style of radical journalism that is smart, unconventional and enlivened with wit and humor.
Many of you have told us you’re proud of the work we’ve done keeping CounterPunch going and developing the magazine format that was one of Alex’s last wishes. Now it’s the time of year when we need to implore you for your financial support. We only interrupt you with one fund appeal a year. And you can be assured that when we ask you for your financial support, we really mean it.
We’ve been telling you for a week that either we meet our fundraising goal of $100,000 over the next month or we’ll be forced to drastically curtail the operation of our website. Many, but not nearly enough of you have rallied with donations. With three more weeks of our fundraiser to go, we’re still far from our make-or-break target.
We’ve been asking some of our readers and writers for our website to say why they value CounterPunch.
Here’s what NOAM CHOMSKY wrote us:
“It is, regrettably, no exaggeration to say that we are living in an era of irrationality, deception, confusion, anger, and unfocused fear — an ominous combination, with few precedents. There has never been a time when it was so important to have a voice of sanity, insight, understanding of what is happening in the world. CounterPunch has performed that essential service with unusual success. It is a matter of paramount importance to ensure that it will continue to do so, with even greater resources than before.”
And RALPH NADER:
“A roaring colosseum of commentary, columnists and tell-it-like-it-was,-is,-and-should be original reportage, complete with a bookstore whose readable volumes tear away the lies, evasions, cover-ups and myths of a censored world. Taste, digest and deepen your mind from this fresh cornucopia called CounterPunch.”
Many websites on the progressive side of the spectrum are cut-and-paste affairs, a mix of columns culled from mainstream newspapers, weeklies, blogs and so forth. Every day our CounterPunch site offers you up to a dozen original articles, and often forty across our three-day weekend site.
Unlike many other outfits, we don’t hit you up for money every month … or even every quarter. But when we ask, we mean it. So this month we humbly ask for your support. We offer in return our independence, our unique position and our editorial choices.
Please, use our brand new secure shopping cart to make a tax-deductible donation to CounterPunch today or purchase a subscription and a gift sub for someone or one of our award winning books (or a crate of books!) as holiday presents. (We won’t call you to shake you down or sell your name to any lists.)
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When Billy Graham Urged Nixon to Kill a Million People
There’s a piquant contrast in the press coverage across the decades of Billy Graham’s various private dealings with Richard Nixon, as displayed on the tapes gradually released from the National Archive or disclosed from Nixon’s papers. We’ll come shortly to the flap over Graham and Nixon’s closet palaverings about the Jews, but first let’s visit another interaction between the great evangelist and his commander-in-chief.
Back in April, 1989, a Graham memo to Nixon was made public. It took the form of a secret letter from Graham, dated April 15, 1969, drafted after Graham met in Bangkok with missionaries from Vietnam. These men of God said that if the peace talks in Paris were to fail, Nixon should step up the war and bomb the dikes. Such an act, Graham wrote excitedly, “could overnight destroy the economy of North Vietnam”.
Graham lent his imprimatur to this recommendation. Thus the preacher was advocating a policy to the US Commander in Chief that on Nixon’s own estimate would have killed a million people. The German high commissioner in occupied Holland, Seyss-Inquart, was sentenced to death at Nuremberg for breaching dikes in Holland in World War Two. (His execution did not deter the USAF from destroying the Toksan dam in North Korea, in 1953, thus deliberately wrecking the system that irrigated 75 per cent of North Korea’s rice farms.)
This disclosure of Graham as an aspirant war criminal did not excite any commotion when it became public in 1989, twenty years after it was written. No one thought to chide Graham or even question him on the matter. Very different has been the reception of a new tape revealing Graham, Nixon and Haldeman palavering about Jewish domination of the media and Graham invoking the “stranglehold” Jews have on the media.
On the account of James Warren in the Chicago Tribune, who has filed excellent stories down the years on Nixon’s tapes, in this 1972 Oval Office session between Nixon, Haldeman and Graham, the President raises a topic about which “we can’t talk about it publicly,” namely Jewish influence in Hollywood and the media.
Nixon cites Paul Keyes, a political conservative who was executive producer of the NBC hit, “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In,” as telling him that “11 of the 12 writers are Jewish.”
“That right?” says Graham, prompting Nixon to claim that Life magazine, Newsweek, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and others, are “totally dominated by the Jews.”
Nixon says network TV anchors Howard K. Smith, David Brinkley and Walter Cronkite “front men who may not be of that persuasion,” but that their writers are “95 percent Jewish.”
“This stranglehold has got to be broken or the country’s going down the drain,” the nation’s best-known preacher declares.
“You believe that?”...
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